


Shadows Settle On The Place That You Left

by ViolentSarcasm



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Snapshots of their lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-03
Updated: 2017-10-06
Packaged: 2019-01-08 16:00:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12257592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViolentSarcasm/pseuds/ViolentSarcasm
Summary: Lucretia makes a soft, sorrowful noise, one that Taako wouldn’t have been able to catch with human hearing. That line of conversation is upsetting her, and he doesn’t know why he cares, but he does, and he doesn’t know why he’s standing up and offering her a hand, either, but he is, and it’s acting on an impulse he cannot for the life of him place when he says, “...cocoa?”Taako has night terrors. So does someone else.





	1. 1: Bureau Headquarters, between Refuge and Wonderland

It’s not uncommon for Taako to find himself snapping out of meditation with a strangled cry, the inexplicable smell of wood smoke and cinnamon lingering for much longer than it should. He can never _remember_ the visions, just the way they make him feel; angry and scared and alone, with the phantom feeling of a thin hand touching his arm, implacable, and a riot of colors playing in front of his eyes like the shimmering of opals.

It’s after one of those visions, the kind that end with him clutching the Umbra Staff hard enough his knuckles go white, that he finds her. He’s up on the quad, which is dark and usually completely empty this late at night, and he sees a glint of light toward the edge of the base.

Curious, he drifts over to it. It’s a phantasmal orb of light, hovering over the shoulder of a human form. It takes him a moment to realize it’s the _Director_ , different as she looks in the soft half-light, gazing pensively out over Faerun. She’s sitting on the very edge of the moon, her legs dangling off the base in what would probably be a reckless fashion if she didn’t have magic powers.

Taako stands behind her silently for a moment, noting the differences between how harsh she looks usually and how she is like this. Her hair is loose from its usual bun, floating around her head in the light breeze, and she’s in a soft, well-worn nightgown made of faded red cotton. Her staff is lying on the ground next to her, and Taako is struck suddenly by how young she must be, how _short_ human lives are, comparatively. She looks, what, fifty? He’s more than three times that, but somehow it feels like she’s got a dozen lifetimes’ worth of stories weighing on her shoulders.

She looks tired.

“You know,” he drawls finally, leaning on his staff, “I’m _pretty_ sure humans need to sleep.”

She jumps. To her credit, she’s fast; it’s only a second before she’s on her feet with her staff in her hand, defensive, and only a second after that before she realizes who he is and relaxes again. She keeps hold of the white oak staff, but settles back down on the ground, cross-legged this time, a little farther from the edge. Her light floats up to illuminate both of them.

“Hello, Taako,” she says, chuckling. “What are you doing up?”

“I told you, I get night terrors,” he says, flopping down next to her. “Besides, I don’t need to sleep. What are _you_ doing up?”

She smiles at him faintly, but her expression is completely unreadable. There’s something about that smile that says the answer to his question is longer, maybe, than he’s looking for.

After a beat, she sighs and says, “...so do I. I get night terrors, that is.”

His ears twist toward her involuntarily and he raises his eyebrows. “You?”

“Me,” she says, her voice twisted with something that could be amusement or bitterness. “I’ve, mm. Seen some shit, Taako.”

He waits. Three A.M. brings out the honesty in people; if she wants to elaborate, she will. It’ll just take a moment.

Sure enough, he sees the moment she drops the Director’s mantle and becomes, momentarily, just Lucretia. She sighs again and says, softly, “my-my home was destroyed when I was nineteen. For most of my adult life it was just me and my family, and they-” she twists the cotton of her dress in her hands miserably. “-well, nothing was the same after the relic wars, Taako, but you knew that.”

“So you dream about the wars?” He whistles through his teeth, sympathetic.

“Some, yes,” she says, shrugging. “I dream about home, too. I dream about my family.” Then she turns to look him in the eye, pinning him with that gaze, with grey eyes steady enough to hold up a world. “What do _you_ dream about, Taako? If you don’t mind me asking.”

He pauses. “I...I don’t remember,” he says honestly, and hopes she believes him. “I always forget when I wake up.”

Lucretia makes a soft, sorrowful noise, one that Taako wouldn’t have been able to catch with human hearing. That line of conversation is upsetting her, and he doesn’t know why he cares, but he does, and he doesn’t know why he’s standing up and offering her a hand, either, but he is, and it’s acting on an impulse he cannot for the life of him place when he says, “...cocoa?”

She blinks at him. He’s managed to genuinely surprise her, which - _score_ , and he smiles cheerfully, only a little fake. She smiles back, more genuine this time than it had been earlier. She has a nice smile; it’s shy and slow and bright, and Taako lets himself bask in it for a moment, internally gloating at Merle. He realizes the cafeteria is closed and quickly tacks on, "in our apartment, I mean. I've got some to spare, and, uh." 

“Lead the way,” she says, warm.


	2. 2: The Starblaster Kitchen, in the third cycle of the journey

It had taken nearly two years for her to admit to her night terrors. Taako or Lup could nearly always be found in the Starblaster kitchen at ludicrous hours, sitting on the icebox with the lights off, reflective eyes wide in a bid to spook whatever poor sap without darkvision tried to get a snack.

Usually, that was Lucretia. Nearly every night she’d slip into the kitchen, silent, to get a glass of water, and she would often drop that water when she caught sight of Taako lounging, catlike, on top of the icebox. Usually, he’d ask her a question.

“Don’t you humans need to sleep?” he said that night, hopping to the ground with a nearly imperceptible thud. He asked her that or something like it almost _every_ night, and usually got a non-answer.

“Yes,” Lucretia said, rolling her eyes.

“So why are you awake two hours before sunrise?”

“I was up late working?” she said, like a question. He stared flatly at her.

“Every night for two years?”

“I,” she said, hesitant, then huffed and started to leave the room rather than finish her thought. He chuckled, pointing his finger at the stove. It crackled to life, and Lucretia turned around, confused, to watch him as he grabbed a pan, filling it with water and placing it gently on the burner. He ducked down, pawing through a low drawer to find his molinillo _before_ he needed it. _Never prepared_ , suck it, Lup. He found it, yanking it out so the pieces clattered together and holding it above his head in celebration.

“...What are you doing?”

“...Making hot chocolate, what does it look like I’m doing,” Taako said, staring at her.

“It looks like you’re boiling water and waving a wooden implement of torture around, actually,” Lucretia responded dryly, leaning against the doorframe. Taako gasped, mock-offended.

“Well, I’m making hot chocolate. If you’re gonna go, go, but there’ll be enough here for more than one person.”

Lucretia stared at him, seeming to waver. After a moment, she darted out of the room. He sighed; well, it had been worth a shot. He shook his head and dropped the chocolate into the water, poking at it with the molinillo idly.

After a moment, though, she slipped back into the room, holding her journals. He turned away from the stove to stare at her as she set them down on the little table and moved to turn on the lights. She caught his gaze and smiled shyly, her grey eyes glittering.

“I wasn’t going to get back to sleep anyway,” she said softly, sitting down and flipping open the journals.

“... _Back_ to sleep?” He had known, of course, that she didn’t just work until three every night, but still.

She sighed heavily through her nose, hands glittering as she idly activated the charm on her pens. “Yes, Taako, _back_ to sleep. I have nightmares.”

Oh. That made sense, actually, when he thought about it. Seeing three worlds destroyed by an insatiable army of darkness was the sort of thing that definitely warranted nightmares. He blinked his confusion away and turned back to the stove, shrugging.

“Makes sense. You don’t have to be so cagey about things, you know.”

“...You’re one to talk,” she said dryly, chuckling.

Taako rolled his eyes, performative, and turned back to her. “I’m special, Lucretia, I don’t _have_ feelings to be cagey about.” When she snickered at him he gasped, playing once again at offense. Her snickering collapsed into full-blown laughter and he felt a strange, unfamiliar surge of pride, and something that might have been...affection? He tamped it down, vowing never to think about it again.

 

He thought about it again. The chocolate became a habit became a ritual became a fact of life; nearly every night, hours after everyone else disappeared to bed, he and Lucretia would sit quietly in the kitchen, each alone with their thoughts but drinking each others’ company as much as they were the cocoa.

It was nice. He found that, for a young human, she was brilliant and knowledgeable and strong, and that she could name every person she had met on their journey, and that she still carried tiny paintings of her parents in a locket around her neck; he found that she had a dry sense of humor entirely at odds with how shy she seemed; he found that she was kind and tired and so very lonely, and he sprinkled some of the cinnamon he’d brought all the way from home in her hot chocolate and didn’t mention it and sat at her side, quiet, as she drank it, as her eyes widened and she turned to start to say something, to ask, because she knew that nobody was allowed to touch the cinnamon but him and Lup, and he stared at her, and she shut her mouth and sat at his side, quiet instead, curled up in her chair like a child. She _was_ a child, comparatively.

Then she glanced up at him and smiled, and it was warm.


	3. 3: Home, After.

It took seven months, on the moon, and two years, on the Starblaster, for Taako to sit by Lucretia’s side late at night, quietly drinking hot chocolate.

After the end of the world, it took twenty-seven. It had taken five for Taako to even get to the point where he could even  _ look  _ at her without getting angry. He had stayed there, wavering on the edge of loathing, for twenty-two years, enough time for her to grow old and Taako to almost show a hint of age, enough time for him to raise a child, or maybe it was Magnus who did, or maybe it was everyone; it’s been enough time since he last sat silently beside her, taking comfort in each other, that he’s almost forgotten how it felt; he’s lived and nearly died and  _ actually  _ died and saved the world and gotten fucking  _ married  _ since the last. He had thought it would never happen again.

It’s during their yearly celebration that it does. Every year they get together on the anniversary of the Day of Story and Song, those of them the song was about, and sit together on the beach or in a library or on the porch of a cottage full of dogs, the seven former members of the IPRE and the family they’ve accidentally built around them; Carey and Killian and Angus and Ren sitting around a fire, laughing as Kravitz tried in vain to get a dog to come out from under a table, or Lup and Barry reenacting their bounty hunts; it’s a moment where they get to be together. Taako takes part, of course; he cooks and jokes and sits curled against his husband’s side, smiling, but it hurts to be there.

This year, Kravitz had to leave early on work, so Taako saw no point in maintaining the pretense of sleep. He’s sitting on the counter of Magnus’ kitchen in the dark instead, staring out the window at the stars, when an orb of light appears in the doorway, followed by a woman’s silhouette.

It’s Lucretia, of course. She’s moving slowly, far too slowly, and her face is lined with age and heartbreak, and Taako hates the tug at his heart that screams at him to help her, to talk to her. He wants to clamp his hands over his ears and ignore it, ignore the love he’s perfectly happy pretending he never felt for her.

He wants to sit next to her.

He wants to hear her laugh, he wants to know if she still carries the pictures of her parents (he knows she does. He hasn’t seen them, but there’s no chance she doesn’t.); he wants to poke fun at her crushes and compliment her drawings, and he  _ wants  _ to forgive her, and at the same time he wants to tear her apart, verbally or physically he’s not sure, he wants to hurt her as badly as she hurt him - he wants to shred those tiny paintings and take from her every fragment of a home she’s ever had, he wants to hug her and he wants to kill her and he wants, he wants, he  _ wants _ .

He thinks, if the temporal chalice offered its powers to him now, he wouldn’t be able to resist. 

She hasn’t seen him yet, since she’s not expecting him and he’s not in her direct line of sight. He could cast Blink and be gone, and she’d never know he was there. He could be gone and pretend not to know about her nightmares, he could be gone and pretend not to  _ care _ .

Instead, he slips down off the counter quietly at the same time as she sits at the table with a heavy sigh. He steps to the stove, turns it on, and finds a pan. He hears her start behind him, sees the light reappear over his shoulder, hears his name.

He doesn’t respond. He doesn’t think he can. It’s on autopilot that he goes through the motions of boiling water and dissolving chocolate and frothing and pouring it into two chipped mugs. He feels brittle, cracked, like any gust of wind could shatter him into a thousand pieces.

He puts down one mug on the table in front of the woman that has been, throughout his life, his colleague, his sister, his boss, his enemy, and a stranger. The child who grew too fast and lived too long, who loved the world so much that she broke it. Someone who took everything from him because she wanted him to  _ have  _ everything, a mess of contradictions held together by kindness and a will of steel.

He gives her a mug of hot chocolate and retreats back to the counter with his, clutching it tight enough he’s almost worried it’ll break. At the table, Lucretia is doing the same, and her shoulders shake, and he feels the urge to hug her fighting with the cold, vicious satisfaction he feels at seeing her hurting, and he takes deep breaths, and tries to stay warm.


End file.
